Catarina and the Beauty Of Killing Fascists

Friday, July 5, 8pm
Saturday, July 6, 7pm

Tiago Rodrigues
National Theater of Portugal
A Festival d’Avignon Production

International Theater | US Premiere 

Get Tickets HERE

PS21 Pavilion Theater
2980 Route 66
Chatham, NY 12037

In Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists, by Tiago Rodrigues, it’s 2028, and every year,  a Portuguese family commemorates the 1954 murder of activist Catarina Eufémia at the hands of the Salazar dictatorship by kidnapping and killing a fascist. But this year, the young woman chosen to carry out the ritual refuses. The family’s credo is “Doing harm in order to practice good,” but the woman asks, Can an act of violence lead to justice? What if the killing isn’t a form of protest, but merely a crime? 

Thus Tiago Rodrigues is asking whether we can defend or preserve democracy by violating its fundamental principles. But rather than offering pat answers, he brings the consequences of these questions to life as dramatic paradoxes that are both lucid and unnervingly grotesque. In doing so, he creates a performance that challenges audiences and their own inner contradictions to the point where it hurts—painfully so at the moment when we should be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Portuguese revolution and the end of fascism in Europe—and makes palpable the threat that has reemerged across the entire continent and beyond. PS21’s performances of Catarina and the beauty of killing fasciststake place on July 4th weekend, an ideal time to focus on the history, meaning, and prospects of democratic institutions in the US.

“The world of fiction, in which I still believe as a theater artist, allows certain things that aren’t possible in politics. Like this completely absurd and truly awful question, “Should the fascist be killed or not?” Only the theater can create a context in which that question exists.” -Tiago Rodrigues

In Portuguese with English supertitles.

Disclaimer:  Auditory warning (gunshots)

2 hours 30 minutes

Image by Joseph Banderet

“Rodrigues isn’t a showy director: He is a humanist at heart, preoccupied with empathy and the ways in which today’s world undermines it. Complexity is always the answer in Rodrigues’s work — and it is one of the best ways to the audience’s heart.” — The New York Times